| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-08, 01:06 in Something about cheese!
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 Post: #21 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by CaptainJistuce As an external observer, it seems to me that both parties have their problems, but the Republican party is much scarier because it has the discipline and unity to achieve its worst impulses. The Democrats have a tendency to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and to get distracted by all the things they *could* be doing rather than the things they *should* be doing. Also, y'know, the whole "white nationalism" thing. With any luck, the Trump years will inspire a generation of politically active citizens, where previously the only significant political activity was from lobbyists and corporations, and those citizens will hold their elected representatives accountable. Here in Australia, we also have a slimy centre-right party and a goofy centre-left party, but we've also got a bunch of minor parties at various points on the spectrum, even some independents, in both the House and the Senate. Sometimes they shoot down good ideas, or make simple things more complex than they ought to be, but often they reign in the worst impulses of the larger parties and pull the conversation towards the needs of the citizens rather than the will of the parties. I'm pretty distrustful of patriotism in general, but this is one of the few things that makes me proud of Australia. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-08, 02:25 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #22 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Is there/can there be a button to move a post from one thread to another, or to a new thread? That'd help prevent topics from drifting too far. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-08, 03:01 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #23 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
It'd be lovely if people kept topics separate on their own, but the bboard has a long and storied history of rambling, and it's not going to change without some gentle enforcement. :/ The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-08, 06:04 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #24 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
That's a good example of how the system works, actually. Our current conservative government doesn't have the majority it needs to pass anything it likes, so it requires the support of minor parties and independents to get things done, which is usually conditional and limited. In situations like this, where the government went off the deep end, senators that would normally vote with the government voted against them, preventing a stupid mistake. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-09, 03:57 in The redo build system
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Post: #25 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
The redo build system kind of blew my mind when I came across it years ago; simple to understand and implement but surprisingly powerful and flexible, it's exactly the kind of software I want to write and to use. Since it was designed by DJB, the same guy who invented the daemontools service monitor and the UCSPI-TCP network server framework, it's inspiringly elegant and more thoroughly Unixy than the actual official Unix tools it replaces. I just came across redo, buildroot, and serializing parallel logs which talks about a new redo feature that records and caches build-logs so that you always get live-updating progress while the project is building, but build logs are always in a deterministic, sensible order no matter how much parallelism is involved. Once again, the trick's pretty simple to understand (and implement) once you've had it explained to you, but it sounded pretty magical to me at first. I really wish I had some kind of project where I could use redo to its full potential, but pretty much everything I'm working on these days is either Rust (which already has its own smart build-system) or Python (which resists having a build-system at all). The biggest niche for redo right now is probably for meta-build-systems that build a bunch of components written using other build-systems, like the "buildroot" project he mentions that builds a bootable Linux disk image from scratch... but I really have no reason to work on anything like that. :/ The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-09, 04:41 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #26 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by CaptainJistuce The thing is, people get old and die, and groups need to recruit new members. If a group yells "brown people are scary" or "healthcare reform" for long enough, even if the group explicitly intends to do nothing about them, they'll attract new members who do care about those issues and want to do something about them. I guess the real battles in American politics are the party primaries, since the real elections don't give much feedback about what the voters actually want. All the more reason to have your say, I guess. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-09, 05:25 in The Copyleft Bust Up: loopholes, licenses, and realpolitik
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Post: #27 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by hunterk The thing is, copyright law defines things like "derivative work" and "copying", so a licence can just say "derivative works allowed" or "copying disallowed", and everybody can figure out exactly what that means. Copyright law doesn't define "commercial use", so it's not practical to say "no commercial use" unless you go on to define exactly what that means. Different people define commercial use differently. For example, some people don't care as long as you don't use their software to build or operate weapons; other people expect to be compensated for their work even if it's being used by a non-profit charity. If a company charges people money for a thing you made, that probably counts as commercial use, but what if a company uses a thing you made to make advertising? Or just gives away the thing you made *as* advertising? Is it commercial use if a company uses your thing in any capacity whatsoever? If so, presumably a stockmarket-traded company counts, but what about a privately-owned company? A cooperative? A sole trader? A kid's lemonade stand? What if your thing is being used by an individual to help them get a job or a pay-raise or other commercial advantage, even if it's not being used by a company directly? Basically, the big reason there's no prominent non/anti-commercial licenses is not ideological, it's practical. That is, I'm not familiar with any non-custom licenses that let me put my source out there and let other people build on it and use it without a.) inviting companies to roll up and sell it as soon as they smell a market or b.) get harassed (literally!) by the aforementioned goofballs for being nonfREEEEEEEE. Traditionally the GPL has been pretty effective "commercial repellent", although the article linked in the OP suggests it's not effective enough for many people. Hassling people isn't cool, though. :( Posted by CaptainJistuce hunterk said "I want things I write to be used by individuals, not companies", and the CC FAQ says "if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term", so it's not really what he's looking for. Posted by wareya The Open Font Licence FAQ says it's OK to sell an OFL font "as long some other font or software is also on the disk, so the OFL font is not sold by itself". So you can't sell an OFL-licensed font, but you can sell two? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-09, 08:19 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #28 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by CaptainJistuce I haven't been following American politics for long enough to have an informed opinion either way on that, so I'll defer to your greater experience. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 06:39 in The Copyleft Bust Up: loopholes, licenses, and realpolitik
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Post: #29 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by hunterk Back when the GPL was first written, when you had a problem, you'd write a program to solve it and run it on a computer. As long as you had a computer and were allowed to make and modify programs, you could solve problems. These days, when you have a problem, you spin up hundreds of computers in AWS, each running hundreds of programs. Being able to make and modify a single program doesn't help anyone solve any problems, so companies do not mind being bound by the GPL in that situation—they're not going to lose out, or have to give up anything of consequence. The GPL works when everybody has a computer and needs software to unlock it. These days, only a few people have computers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) and no amount of software licensing trickery is going to help restore user freedom if nobody can run the software, There are apparently roaming squads of FOSS enthusiasts who trawl through github for anything that's not licensed in a way they like and they "encourage" the project to relicense. I mean, I can understand people being averse to unusual licenses. If I'm looking at a library I'd like to use and I see "MIT" or "GPL" or "Apache 2.0", I know what I'm signing myself up for, and I only have to worry about whether the code does what I want. If I see some other licence, I have to read through it and decide for myself (in my uneducated, non-lawyerly opinion) whether or not it allows whatever things I might want to do... or I just roll my eyes and move on to the next candidate. It's always possible that the person who chose that licence didn't fully understand the implications of their choice on the rest of the community, and from that point of view it might be helpful to explain to them what's going on... but man, I'm pretty sure crusading is *always* counter-productive. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 07:34 in bboard archive
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Post: #30 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Currently, the higan docs link to this forum post, but I can't find that thread in the currently-available archive. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 09:30 in bboard archive
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Post: #31 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
 Well *I* feel sheepish. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 10:41 in bboard archive (revision 1)
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Post: #32 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
OK, so that forum post is great, and exactly what I wanted. Meanwhile, this forum post in the same thread seems to have had all its block-quotes removed, compared to the original version. Overzealous sanitization, I guess? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 13:00 in bboard archive
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Post: #33 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
And the new dump won't create new URLs, right? If understand what you've done correctly, it shouldn't, but I figured I'd ask... The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 21:35 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #34 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
And predictably enough, that "even more incompetent PM" who got booted out by his own party seems to be trying to gather support for another go. If you have conservative views, that's fine, even if you're a politician. We can talk about them and put them to the electorate and see what happens. But this weird insistence that far-right-wing conservatism is what the country really wants, all electoral evidence to the contrary, is bizarre and frustrating. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-10, 22:30 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #35 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Given that our conservative party was elected with only a one-seat majority last time, and in the lead-up to election next year they've just deposed their own leader AGAIN, I feel pretty comfortable even the moderate conservatives won't win next time. Then again, that does kind of depend on our progressive party presenting themselves as a kinder, more sensible, more pragmatic alternative. I guess I'm more worried about the progressives shooting themselves in the foot than about people embracing our current conservative leader. Say what you want about Trump's politics and policies, the man's got bravado and bluster that helps him connect with his voters. I don't think Australia's really had a charismatic leader since the 1980s, when our Prime Minister held the Guinness world record for drinking a yard of beer in eleven seconds. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-12, 10:20 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #36 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Hey now, I'm the fascist dictator around here. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-12, 11:19 in Ask me about SCI
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Post: #37 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
In my experience, an engine like this starts out limited and clunky, then gets enhanced to the point where it can do some really cool things, then gets a whole boatload of extra buggy features nailed on the side to try to compete with other, newer engines, then gets dumped and replaced. For example, SCUMM was a nice idea for Maniac Mansion, was a great foundation for Monkey Island 2 and DoTT, but with Full Throttle they changed the verb system and added weird FMV stuff and it all got a bit silly. Which SCI game jumped the shark, technically? What was the Last Good SCI game? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-14, 06:38 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
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Post: #38 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by KoiMaxx That's an anime villain name, right there. EDIT: All of us → http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3366 The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-15, 08:15 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #39 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
Posted by tomman I actually tried out the Win3.1 theme for a while, but... - most posts wind up displayed in black on dark grey (#808080), which is... not great, contrast wise. - The style for buttons draws the dark-grey bottom-right shading, but not the white top-left shading, and that kind of historical inaccuracy is a deal-breaker. Kawa, you should use the `border-image` CSS property to make a proper Win3.1 button. I'm tempted to try and make my own theme based on (say) the Solarized Light palette, but looking at the existing themes all the classes are stuff like ".cell0, .cell1, .cell2", and I don't think I want to understand markup like that. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-16, 01:40 in sr.ht, a new software forge
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Post: #40 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 890 days Last view: 87 days |
The first unified open-source hosting service was SourceForge, which provided a hosted versioning system, issue tracker, mailing list and downloads, and it was advertising supported and turned out to be kind of terrible. More recently we've had Google Code (supported at Google's whim, and unsurprisingly shut down without recourse), GitHub (proprietary and paid for by enterprise customers) and GitLab (AGPL "community edition", proprietary "enterprise edition", and paid for by enterprise customers). All of those sites have one thing in common: the actual end users don't and can't pay for the services they use, so they don't have any control or influence beyond trying to kick up a stink on social media when something goes wrong. https://sr.ht/ is a new software forge that brings some new ideas: - Pure AGPL, no "enterprise edition" - not a monolithic "do everything" service, but a cluster of related single-purpose services that can integrate with each other and with anything else - All functionality is free for now, but when the alpha period is over, hosting content will require a monthly fee. Free accounts will be able to contribute to existing projects, but not create new projects, and contributing to the sr.ht project itself can earn credits for paid access. I'm pretty happy with GitLab myself, but I'm under no illusions that I could ever contribute to or influence its development. sr.ht is a much riskier proposition right now, since (as the billing FAQ says) it's currently operating at a loss and is comparatively unknown, but I really like the idea of services being directly supported by the people that use them. I also like the looser coupling of services: GitLab's CI system has a config file per repository, so it's not practical to build a thing from multiple repositories. sr.ht's CI system has a config file per build, and you can automatically submit the config file from a repository when you update that repository, but you can also submit config files at other times, or config files that point to repositories on other services. Also, sr.ht's CI system uses virtual machines, not Docker containers, so you can build and test on operating systems that aren't Linux. I don't really have an excuse to try it out right now today, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
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